Quotes About Loneliness

BEFORE BORIS, I HAD borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was.

Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn't anything else—I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to Wind, Sand and Stars and a lonely cockpit high above the desert.

and felt the strangeness of the city pressing in all around me, smells of tobacco and malt and nutmeg, café walls the melancholy brown of an old leather-bound book and then beyond, dark passages and brackish water lapping, low skies and old buildings all leaning against each other with a moody, poetic, edge-of-destruction feel, the cobblestoned loneliness of a city that felt—to me, anyway—like a place where you might come to let the water close over your head.

Then again: there was not exactly a word for Boris and me... It was just about drowsy air-conditioned afternoons, lonely and drunk, blinds closed against the glare, empty sugar packets and dried-up orange peels strewn on the carpet, Dear Prudence from the White Album (which Boris adored) or else the same mournful old Radiohead over and over...

My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn't pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee.

for the first time I realized how lonely the next two months would really be, with the school closed, the snow deep, everyone gone.

But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless.

Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can truly understand us.

They had spoken and passed like ships at sea, in this wide life, and now who could count the miles and billows between them! Never to cross or come in sight again!

The reality hits hard when one wants to pick up the phone to share some experience only to remember that the loved one is not at the other end.

Lord take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley slave of life who puts out to sea alone under a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon fires of the ancient hope

Like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge, for I am opening the flood-gates myself, against my will. Ah! but my courage fails me and my heart is sick within me! -- Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!" (A Rebours, final words)

Today, we share the gospel primarily as a means of addressing felt needs. We give testimonies of changed lives and say to people that if they want to become better parents or overcome depression or loneliness, then Christ is the answer for them. As true as this may be, such an approach to evangelism is inadequate for two reasons.

Sometimes I felt so alone that I wish there were a bigger, longer word for alone. I tried to tell Grandma about this feeling, about my suspicion that life was nicking away pieces of me.

The men drink a third beer, then a fourth, in preparation for the cold trip crosstown. "I wish I could meet a decent woman." Howard, who has learned the great secret, and who after beer, is generous: "Go to a library.

hungry for breath like a kite falling stray, the wire grows slack the child within pulls at the empty air.

A Touch of Comfort On the darkest night of my life, God made sure I wasn't alone. It not only brought me comfort that night, but the memory brings comfort every time I start to feel despair. On the darkest night God will shine a light. -Beth Arvin

Their loss-of-comms link-up point was just a mile to the southeast. There was no sign of any other human life.

I'd slink back to my room and curl up on the bed like a fish-hook and cry until I was rusty.

But one can acquire a taste for love as for loneliness or ugliness as for saintliness. Each a special way of going down.

The Abandoned Valley" Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

You hear yourself walking on the snow. You hear the absence of the birds. A stillness so complete, you hear the whispering inside of you. Alone morning after morning, and even more at night. They say we are born alone, to live and die alone. But they are wrong. We get to be alone by time, by luck, or by misadventure. — Jack Gilbert, from "Betrothed," Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

Meanwhile" Loneliness is the mother's milk of America.

Imagine if suffering were real. Imagine if those old people were afraid of death. What if the midget or the girl with one arm really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be to live if some people were alone and afraid all their lives.